>>32196332Sadly, that's the current state of everything technology-related that's mainstream, and I'd agree if it was about pretty much anything else.
In this case it's justified, since that "half of the functionality" you're talking about is literally just online competitions and ranked battles, in which case there just have to be some rules against cheating, with the offenders being thrown out. Besides that, it's just an additional online service, that just happens to work with the game, not related to regular online interactions. Bank is the same thing in that respect, except it locks away functionality that used to be in the games (transferring and regional dex).
